Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Log shipping
Database backups
Phase 6: Monitoring and Management
Resource monitoring and alerting
Phase 2: Discovery
Phase 2 is the discovery stage of the process. This is unlike the discovery phase shown
in the previous plan, which is focused on obtaining a proper inventory of the current
system and an assessment of the current physical infrastructure to ensure you understand
the full scope of what you will be virtualizing and then establishing a baseline of the
current workloads so you can establish the requirements of CPU, memory, disk, and
network.
The discovery stage for virtualizing a database is focused on establishing a baseline of
the existing vSphere environment and comparing it to the baseline of the existing
database workload to understand where the
environment is deficient
. At this point in
time, you already have an existing vSphere infrastructure onto which you will be
introducing the database workload. You need to understand what will happen when you
introduce the demands of a production database onto that infrastructure. Identifying
those deficiencies in the existing environment and making the necessary adjustments to
support the production database are important at this stage.
Phase 2.1: Database Consolidations
This is an excellent point in the process to give some serious consideration to going
through a database consolidation exercise. A lot of the information you need for the
database consolidation you are already gathering in the discovery phase. Based on our
experience with SQL Server database consolidation efforts, we typically see greater
than 50% consolidation ratios. Not only does this lower the database management
footprint of the environment, it can have an impact on licensing.
Phase 3: Infrastructure Adjustments
At this point, you have analyzed the vSphere baseline and compared it to the database
baseline and fully understand where the existing infrastructure is deficient. You need to
make the necessary adjustments to that infrastructure so it is able to meet the resource
needs of the database.
This could be as simple as adding more memory to a host, adding additional hosts to a
cluster, moving virtual machines off a host to free up resources for a database, or adding
a high-performance storage array to the existing environment. What is important is that
once you understand where the existing infrastructure is deficient, you make the needed
adjustments so when you virtualize the database your efforts will be successful.
